WHEN Israel's ninth graders began classes in September, they were carrying in their book bags tools of a changing national consciousness. Their 20th-century history textbooks had just been revised from the standard Zionist view of the state's founding in 1948 to include elements of a competing narrative. In the new books the term Palestinian is used not only to refer to a people but to a longstanding nationalist movement. In study questions, students are asked to place themselves in the shoes of Palestinian Arabs living in Jerusalem or Jaffa as the Zionists arrived and built their settlements. The students read that the 1948 War of Independence against the Arab world was not as lopsided a contest as Israelis have been brought up to believe. According to the new books, the Jews fielded more trained fighters than the Arabs and, apart from the very first weeks of battle, benefited from a military edge.

The new books, begun five years ago under the liberal administration of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and worked on quietly under the conservative Benjamin Netanyahu, were brought out in August under Prime Minister Ehud Barak without advance publicity. They have engendered substantial controversy. An op-ed column in The Jerusalem Post on Sept. 5 titled ''Post-Zionist Takeover?'' lamented the new historical perspectives ''seeping dangerously into our children's classrooms'' and charged that the revised books ''undermine the moral case for Zionism.'' But there has been no move to replace the books.

The French philosopher Ernest Renan once defined a nation as ''a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbors.'' Some of those responsible for the new textbooks clearly believe Israel fits that description. Avi Shlaim, a professor at St. Antony's College, Oxford, and a leading revisionist historian of Israel whose work has helped inspire the new schoolbooks, does as well. That the textbooks should appear almost simultaneously with the publication of Shlaim's major new work, ''The Iron Wall'' (which will be available on Dec. 6), and an even more significant history of Zionism, ''Righteous Victims,'' by Benny Morris, marks a turning point in the nation's historiography and sense of itself.

The traditional history of the Jewish state portrays Zionism as a pure, almost nave movement of young socialists who fled European anti-Semitism beginning in the 1880's to return to the land of their forefathers. Palestine, this history relates, was a neglected arid strip with a small Jewish population and a larger but still insignificant Arab one.

The Zionists bought land at exorbitant prices and extended hands of friendship and cooperation to the local Arabs. After the Nazis exterminated one-third of world Jewry during World War II, the international community understood the Jewish plight and voted at the United Nations in 1947 to partition Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. The Jews were overjoyed by this compromise, but the Arabs, inflamed by arrogance and hatred, declared war. Over the course of the following year, the tiny, lightly armed Jewish community in Palestine fought off and ultimately vanquished not only local Palestinian gangs but the well-trained armies of numerous Arab states. During the course of that war, the Arab governments called on the locals to leave so that the armies could do their work swiftly and efficiently. That led to the creation of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees. At the end of the war, Israel tried to make peace with its neighbors, but they rejected the overtures and cynically exploited the Palestinian refugee problem.

Arab scholars and some outsiders have long dismissed this narrative as false and self-serving. But until the middle 1980's, few Israelis saw much to challenge there. Then, with the opening of Israeli state archives and the maturation of a young generation of historians, many of them trained abroad (Shlaim and Morris are among the most prominent examples), Israeli scholars began to question key elements of that history. They declared that the old history was myth, and that they were writing the ''new history.'' They have thus collectively become known as Israel's ''new historians,'' and when their work built up the critical mass of a genuine scholarly movement in the early years of this decade, it created quite a storm.

The old history of Israel was a heroic one, centered, in effect, on the question, How did this miracle happen? The new history has tended to focus on the tawdry and decidedly unmiraculous. State archives contain clear evidence of double deals, schemes to transfer Arabs out of the country and rebuffed gestures of peace by the Arab states. As Shlaim describes it in his new book: ''Revisionist Israeli historians . . . believe that postwar Israel was more intransigent than the Arab states and that it therefore bears a larger share of the responsibility for the political deadlock that followed the formal ending of hostilities. . . . The files of the Israel Foreign Ministry, for example, burst at the seams with evidence of Arab peace feelers and Arab readiness to negotiate with Israel from September 1948 on.''